Mike Tyson is coming to Netflix in a big way.
The famous heavyweight boxer has two projects coming to the streaming service over the next two months. The first is Tyson, a four-part documentary series in the style of Netflix’s other celebrity documentaries like Sly, Arnold, and Beckham. (It’s notable that these mononymous projects use the subject’s first name or nickname if they’re an actor, but their last name if they’re an athlete.)
The second, Mike Tyson: Return of the Mike, is a comedic one-man show by the boxer. The two projects will tackle Tyson’s incredible meteoric rise, and his subsequent decades as an American celebrity, from different angles.
“Can you imagine being a high school dropout, 20 years old, and you’re the champ of the world?” He asks straight to camera in the trailer for Tyson. 40 years later, it’s clearly a question the man himself is still wrestling with. Watch the trailer above and read on for everything else to know about the docu-series.
The Plot
Clearly modeled after Netflix’s previous celebrity-focused documentaries like Arnold and Sly — to say nothing of The Last Dance, which originally aired on ESPN in 2020 but has since become a perennial user favorite on the streaming platform — Tyson is an overview of the titular man’s rise and fall and redemption. Like those previous projects, it’s built around a central interview with the man himself while other important people in his life appear as talking heads, supplemented by plenty of archival clips.
The documentary will clearly cover the biggest incidents in Tyson’s career, with the trailer featuring footage of one of the most infamous bouts, when Tyson bit rival Evander Holyfield’s ear, and a brief moment of the current Tyson looking back on it.
“I was a nut back then, huh?” he says.
The Creative Team
Tyson is directed by Floyd Russ, who has already overseen multiple documentary projects for Netflix. For their sports-focused Untold series, he directed the piece about the 2004 NBA player/fan brawl known as the “Malice at the Palace,” and for the streamer’s true-crime American Manhunt series, he directed the episodes about O.J. Simpson and the Boston Marathon bombing. Additionally, Tyson was edited by Wax Taber and Dan Duran, with music by Raffertie.
Mike Tyson: Return of the Mike is directed by the boxer’s wife, Kiki Tyson.
The Awards Prospects
Netflix’s celebrity documentaries are not always guaranteed to win or even be nominated for awards, but their projects about athletes seem to do better than their works about actors. The Last Dance won the 2020 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, which is given out as part of the Creative Arts Emmys. Beckham, which was about soccer player David Beckham, won the same award in 2024, but Sly and Arnold were not nominated in the category.
On the other hand, Mike Tyson: Return of the Mike could compete for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special, but it would face stiff competition from other standup specials by veteran comedians, as well as increasingly popular concert documentaries.
The Release Date
All four hourlong episodes of Tyson will launch on Netflix on Oct. 13. Mike Tyson: Return of the Mike lands on the platform just under a month later, on Nov. 3.
